What role does order play in Mundania? When is this property challenged? Everyday life is where technologies withdraw. Infrastructures and the concealment of complexity are enmeshed in the dynamics of the commonplace, in the interplay between order and disorder. Also uncanny circumstances are veiled below ordered structures and grids, and through often numbing procedures. Sometimes order is challenged.

Standard procedures

Everyday life is rule-bound. It is orderly. Everyday life is however also based on improvisation, the nonsensical and the happenstance. Everyday life is this strange mix of routine and irregularity, where even recurrent disruptions seem to seep into the fabric of acceptance and normality. Uncertainties become enmeshed with monotony. It is paradoxical, ‘both ordinary and extraordinary, self-evident and opaque, known and unknown, obvious and enigmatic’, as cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore put it (2001: 16). Sometimes things just seem to happen, or they happen while we are busy doing something else. The ‘everyday is marked by both repetition and change, and by disciplinary assemblages that not only produce order but also disorder’ (Michael 2016: 650).

There is no standard version of the everyday. Yet, standards are enmeshed with the ways life unfolds. A standard is a unifying power in the upholding of technological systems. Technologies and infrastructures are sustained by ongoing processes and arrangements, by agreements and by formalized common understandings. Organization, classification and standards, together with maintenance, induce what seems like a permanent state, makes it possible to experience the variable and even irregular as a solid unified structure. It makes certain things withdraw while others pop up and provoke attention.

Standards, classifications and categorizations can be visible, and they can be manifested physically, like in the row of numbered architectural box-like houses along a street. Processes of classification are also part of the infrastructural, through withdrawn systematicity. The numbers on the houses, the addresses are indications of a drawn-out expanse of bureaucratical organization, classification and ongoing procedures. Population registration and utility services, statistics and connectivity.